Abstract: Rapid developments of smart sensor technologies envisage a new era where information handling and knowledge sharing will play a crucial role. Traditional sensors were conceived as simple hardware transducers of physical quantities into measurable signals, eventually requiring an analogue/digital conversion to make data available for software applications. IEEE-1451 family of standards has added to mere transduction some architectural prescriptions to mainly address the issue of connection transparency, a desirable property virtually making any sensor a plug-and-play device. Our percept is that next generation smart sensor-based systems will have to face another challenge: the need to endow devices with the ability to process application-level bits of knowledge to best accomplish their informative goals. As a result, unexpected proactive and dialogue-oriented behaviors will have to be taken into account, thus reducing the gap between what we commonly refer to as smart sensors and intelligent agents. In order to support this view, a semantic-driven sensor-based system architecture is introduced and an example proof-of-concept case study is commented.